Cultures and Ethics of Sharing - Universität Innsbruck

The Sharing Turn: Why we are generally nice and have agood chance to cooperate our way out of the mess wehave gotten ourselves intoVolker GrassmuckAbstractAfter a period of neoliberal blind faith in the power of economic self-interest and of austerity totackle its catastrophic effects, we are re-discovering our more pleasant sides. There is currently asurge of interest in sharing – in research in various developmental sciences, in popular debate andmost of all in practice. This paper proposes that our society is undergoing a Sharing Turn that hasits roots in human nature and in cultural history, is media-technologically enabled by networkedcomputers and is fueled by the rising anger over societal systems that fail to serve the public interest.It attempts to set out some of the roots, diverse manifestations and dynamics of this paradigmaticshift, and it expresses hope that the ‘trending’ values of sharing and cooperating willchange the world for the better.Dear reader, I would like to share some thoughts with you. That sounds easy enough. Ihave some thoughts on sharing, derived from practice, observation and literature. I havewritten them down. If you read them here, we may share some of these thoughts in common,and each of us can draw our own conclusions from them.It sounds simple, yet, it is counter-intuitive. It runs counter to an intuition informed by theidea of the Homo economicus, the self-interested rational economic actor, who does notshare but keeps things to himself, who does not cooperate but competes with others. Basedon this image of human I should make the most of my assets by e.g. selling them exclusivelyfor a hefty consulting fee. A landmark in the formation of that intuition was GarrettHardin's essay on the “Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) telling us that sharing things incommon does not work, because “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all”.This intuition is losing ground. Today, it is just as plausible, certainly among people likeyou, dear reader, who are interested in the phenomenon of sharing, to expect Open Accessto a paper which is situated in a science commons, standing on the shoulders of generationsof researchers and enabled by public funding.‘Sharing’ is indeed a booming, or in contemporary parlance, a ‘trending’ issue. Contemporarycommentary and marketing likes to make it seem like something entirely unprecedentedemerged from the digital revolution, from Web 2.0, from social networks, from thegeneration of ‘digital natives’. At the same time sharing appears as an eternal trait of mankind,that which distinguishes our species from our closest evolutionary relatives. Newsabound on new research in evolutionary biology and anthropology disproving the view of